iPad Orchestra at Mozfest, Ravensbourne, Greenwich

Mozfest is a two-day festival taking place at Ravensbourne on the Greenwich Peninsula organised by Mozilla, a company dedicated to ensuring that the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. The festival focuses on exploring many of the current issues facing web users such as privacy, copyright, big data and much much more. We ran two sessions at this year’s festival as part of the Digital Arts and Culture space which this year was curated by the fantastic Julie Neville from Arts Award. You can read about our other project here.

We teamed up with sister organisation Transformance Music to deliver a workshop for attendees of this year’s Mozfest to connect and inspire through the use of the iPad as a musical instrument.

It was almost like you weren’t learning… but you were…a lot! It was like the future of what school could be.

— Maria, 10

We kicked off with a performance led by Dave Darch and the iPad Orchestra he had recently set up at St Patrick’s Catholic Primary School in Walthamstow, East London. Thirteen young people played chords, melodies and rhythms using the GarageBand app on Apple iPads to create another take on a recent remix of Bob Marley’s Is This Love?

Dave led the session as a workshop, briefly rehearsing the young people so that festival participants, many of them also facilitators of creative digital learning, gained an insight in to the process the young people had been inviolved in in the lead up to the performance. After performing the piece the adults and young people swapped places and the children from St Patrick’s were tasked with teaching their parts to the grown-ups. After a brief rehearsal the adults performed their version with the young people coaching and encouraging throughout!

I feel that I’m very creative but I usually only think about science. I tell my dad all about my inventions. Music is a new way for me to be creative that I never tried before.

— Michael, 10

The second half of our session, led by Ben Sellers of Transformance Music, allowed for a creative and collaborative experience between the young people and adults with some simple guidelines for how to proceed. Small groups of 4 or 5 worked rapidly to produce a new song based on elements from the performance they’d just taken part in. Every new piece created was varied and distinct.

It was something I could talk to my Dad about. He knew nothing about it but when he heard all about it he was really proud.

— Davina, 10

The experience of working creatively with new people and across age ranges clearly had a positive and energising effect on all taking part. The session completed with a sharing of the new works produced and was thoughtfully critiqued and praised by both young people and adults alike.

If you would like to talk to us about running iPad Orchestra or music technology workshops please do not hesitate to get in touch with us HERE or via @ALL_educators on Twitter.